111b: Setting up Office: Paperwork

The Membership Handbook requires the departing officer to hand over all materials from to the successor. If you are a newly-hired officer and you’re having difficulties as far as obtaining the records and materials from the departing officer, please speak to your direct supervisor so that they can speak to your predecessor and remind them to take care of this.

Common officer assets for an office may include:

Office Email Address: If the position has an official Email address, the incoming officer should be provided with the current password. Don’t forget to immediately change the password when logging in for the firofficer time.

Character Sheets & Backgrounds: These should be in the Approval Database, and ensuring the incoming officer has correct access to the database can satisfy this requirement unless there are additional paper copies.

Setting Materials & Chronicle History: One of the most important and forgotten assets is the setting material for the office. Even if just a simple timeline was maintained, it allows future office holders to go back through and reference what actually happened in the past should questions come up. It also allows future office holders to build upon your work, maintaining continuity in chronicle.

Current and Completed Plotkits and NPCs: It is important that these are transferred to help maintain chronicle continuity; even if the new officer does not make use of them, they should still be on hand for reference.

Copies of all Reports Filed by Previous Office Holder: These will often be in the sent folder of the officer email address or saved as a Google Doc if prepared as one. Failing that, they should be in the archives of your region’s reports group.

Investigations and Disciplinary Actions: These need to be transferred so that future officers are aware of what has happened in case there is a pattern of behavior that needs to be corrected.

Task List: Make a list of items that are high priority or that your successor will immediately encounter, such as ongoing elections or investigations.

Prestige Audits: Have a folder of completed prestige audits. This is particularly important for logs that have been sent up for Regional or National audit.

Character Sheets and Backgrounds

It’s preferred that officers encourage all members store their character sheets and backgrounds in the Approval Database, even if they have not applied for an approval (or never intend to apply for an approval). This ensures that all characters for a particular venue are properly attached to the correct VSS, and also makes it easy for a new officers to have access to character sheets without the need for transfer of additional files.

Setting Materials and Plotkits

For Domains and Regions – a shared set of Dropbox folders or shared Google Docs are recommended. These are both excellent methods of making it easy for new officers to quickly find past and current materials for whatever venue they are storytelling, or area they are coordinating. It also acts to archive all of the information, ensuring it doesn’t become lost in future years.

Copies of all Reports Filed by Previous Office Holder

These will often be in the sent folder of the officer email address or saved as a Google Doc if prepared as one. Failing that, they should be in the archives of your region’s reports group. If neither of these are the case, hard copies or copies on a CD or flash drive will do. As long as there are copies, and those copies are transferred between officers.

Investigations and Disciplinary Actions

One of the most difficult items to track between outgoing and incoming officers is investigations and disciplinary actions. Because we wish to respect the privacy of our members, we will often redact the listed/archived versions of the coordinator reports. Thus, it is exceedingly important to ensure any investigations or disciplinary actions that happen in the course of an officer’s term are transferred to the incoming officer.

Task List

The membership handbook is not always comprehensive when it comes to the responsibilities and requests that come with the offices of ST or Coordinator. Because of this, it is important for the outgoing officer to make a general timeline and task list to act as a “cheat sheet” for the incoming officer. Things like due dates for prestige recommendations for regional and national events, processes for fgotm and regional events, and the status of player involvement in plotkits or proxies.

Prestige Audits

One of the most frustrating and confusing document to keep track of for members is the prestige log. Time and time again, members are continuously losing or having issues updating their logs. This is even more confusing since the club recently had a change in process by which prestige is logged and categorized. Though there is a yahoo group for national audits, MCReview@yahoogroups.com, only 2 people per region are allowed on that group, and it is specifically for review of membership class 12+, or when a member is transferring regions. It is important that each coordinator keep up with their members’ audits, it saves heartache down the line. A google drive folder, yahoo account folder, dropbox, etc… If instead you simply wish to save it to local drive, ensure there is at a minimum regular backups of that information, so nothing is lost.